Talk given in October 2012 at the Institute for Hate Studies symposium on Hate and Political Discourse.

1. Rachel Dean-Ruzicka
Georgia Institute of Technology
Combating Hate through Young
Adult Literature

2. Privilege
 Benefiting from the systems that discriminate
against or oppress others; one important
aspect of being privileged is not having to
think about oppression if one doesn’t want to.

3. Challenging Tolerance project
This project seeks to do two things: first, I argue that
tolerance itself is not the admirable goal that it is often held
up to be. Tolerance is always connected to existing
structures of power and privilege. To promote tolerance as
the morally appropriate response to difference ultimately
encourages those in the position of power to tolerate those
with less power, creating that “colonizing fantasy” that bell
hooks refers to (31). Second, this project uses the
cosmopolitan theories of Kwame Anthony Appiah and Judith
Butler to argue that literature can help readers engage with
difference in ways that may help them develop a sense of
appreciation or acceptance for others that goes beyond

4. Challenging Tolerance texts
 From  To

5. Neo-Nazis and Relativism

6. Cosmopolitanism
 “One distinctly cosmopolitan
commitment is to pluralism.
Cosmopolitans think that there
are many values worth living
by and that you cannot live by
all of them. So we hope and
expect that different people
and different societies will
embody different values. (But
they have to be values worth
living by.) Another aspect of
cosmopolitanism is what
philosophers call fallibilism—
the sense that our knowledge
is imperfect, provisional,
subject to revision in the face
of new evidence” (144).

7. Neo-Nazi Protagonists

8. Community Responses to Hate

9. Humanities and Hate Studies
How do we move beyond “feeling right?”